Atheist Ethicist

In my last post, I identified a couple of ways in which the belief-desire model for intentional behavior is inadequate. Beliefs and desires ...

A member of the studio audience directed me to a podcast on National Public Radio called "Choosing Wrong" . The motivation behin...

I wrote something - as a Facebook comment - that was wrong. Worse, I think I wrote it because I wanted to write something that people woul...

Well, here's a lists of posts for the first part of the Desirism Book series. If you are looking for a place to go (or to send people)...

With this posting, we will have a foundation on which a moral system can be built. We will have all of the essential elements and all of the...

George Will has left the Republican Party in protest over Donald Trump. That's the wrong thing to do. Really, the only thing George...

We have an imaginary universe in which one occupant (Alph) has only one desire (to gather stones) in a world where the number of stones is l...

Through several postings, we have had a universe with one person (Alph) with one desire (to gather stones). This is a universe with a limite...

I am not a citizen of Great Britain, but I do have an opinion regarding Brexit - Britain's referendum on whether to remain in or leave t...

In my last post, I introduced Bett - a person with no desires - into a world that originally contained Alph with his one desire to gather st...

We have a universe with one person (Alph) and one desire (to gather stones). Recall that his desire to gather stones is a motivating reaso...

I am about to add a second person to this imaginary universe. Before I do, I would like to review what we have. We have a universe with on...

[Author;s Note: This is intended to be inserted between posts 0010 and 0011. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the...

In "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" (The Philosophical Review Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jul., 1972), pp. 305-316), Philipp...

In his address to supporters, Bernie Sanders listed some objectives for his followers to work on in the years ahead. Many have merit, but a ...

Typically, in discussions regarding the relationship between right action and motives, we encounter a contrast between two types of reasons....

In this post I want to present my understanding of the position that the Obama administration takes on the use of rhetoric regarding the con...

There are people who tell me that I need to "find God" or seek religion if I am going to understand morality. However, I do not ...

There are voices, some of them liberal, who assert that liberals do not have a proper attitude towards Islam. These critics accuse (other) l...